I’m not going to say who, but the clue is right on the spread.\u00a0 Check it out, then head on over to the Facebook 2016 Art Journal Adventure group, request to join,\u00a0and you’ll see the post that prompted the lettering!<\/p>\n
There are not a ton of photos today since most of what I did was use a pencil to apply guidelines, then letter.\u00a0 I will talk a little about varying the size of letters and changing case mid-word.\u00a0 There are lots of ways to take your usual handwriting style and alter it.\u00a0 You don’t need to be a calligrapher or lettering expert to make the words on your pages a bit more lively.\u00a0 As you’ll see, the text can wander in a more or less straight line, curve and curl, and even intersect with a page border.\u00a0 All of these things lead to making interesting pages that a viewer can enjoy looking closely at.<\/p>\n
I wanted a colorful background, but nothing that would compete with the lettering.\u00a0 I chose Liquitex Basics <\/a>in Bright Aqua Green<\/a>, Titanium White<\/a>, and Light Blue Permanent <\/a>and applied the colors with a baby wipe.\u00a0 I used only one wipe and let the colors mix on it and on the page, apply another before the first was completely dry.\u00a0 At the end of all that I added a bit more white to soften what was already there.\u00a0 One note \u00a0of caution… if you scrub the pages hard enough, for long enough, the paper will pill!<\/p>\n To add a little more interest to the background, I spattered Daler Rowney’s FW Pearlescent Ink <\/a>(Waterfall Green<\/a>) over the entire spread.\u00a0 To do this, put about half an eye dropper full on your work surface, grab a #4 Fan Brush<\/a>, dip it in a little water, then mix into the Waterfall Green<\/a>, and load the brush.\u00a0 Hold it in your dominant hand, stick out the forefinger of your other, and tap the brush on the extended finger.\u00a0 Splatters will happen.\u00a0 The more ink in the brush the larger the splatters.\u00a0 Less ink requires a brisker tap against your forefinger and should give you smaller spatters.\u00a0 Spatters have a tendency to travel what seems a disproportionate distance and you’re likely to find them in… unexpected places.\u00a0 Cover anything you don’t want spattered.\u00a0 You’ve been warned!<\/p>\n Since the background is reasonably plain, I did spatter freely, allowing the droplets to be reasonably dense on the pages.<\/p>\n Then it was time to begin to letter, but before I picked up a PITT Pen <\/a>to make a mark on the page, I penciled in a line so there was a baseline to work from.\u00a0 You can’t see it well here, but the words are written on the line that spirals from the inside out, getting more open as the spiral expands.\u00a0 As it travels across the spread it\u00a0straightens to more of a curvy horizontal line.<\/p>\n Now, about those letters.\u00a0 I mixed cases, using UPPERcase letters and lowercase ones in the same word.\u00a0 I want this text to reflect my handwriting – you should expect yours to be different – that with some minor adjustments took on a funky, loose look.\u00a0 See the “I” in the word size?\u00a0 It looks more like a carrot than an I, but I like it and that’s what matters.\u00a0 Mix the letters: cross the letter t in different places, make the length of the long line of the t varied, so no two look the same.\u00a0 Alter the letter “Y”, making some curvy and others with all sharp angles.\u00a0 Alter the height of the letters in the same word.\u00a0 Funky is the goal, not perfection.\u00a0\u00a0Plus, funky is far easier to achieve.<\/p>\n If you peer intently at your computer screen, you’ll just be able to see the parallel, curvy lines at the bottom of the page.\u00a0 Some text is there too, but it’s faint.\u00a0 Doing this page presented a challenge in as much as I wanted the lines really light so they would erase easily (use a pencil with a hard lead) but they needed to be visible in the photos.\u00a0 Everything I wrote on this page, with the exception of the text on the top of the spread was written following a guide line.\u00a0 It’s really the only way I could get the words to follow a curve correctly.\u00a0 Or follow a straight line for that matter.<\/p>\n My other hard and fast rule was to write the words twice.\u00a0 The first time with\u00a0a pencil to test that everything would fit in the space, but also to get a look at how changing the characteristics of certain letters affected the overall look of the words.<\/p>\n Look at the word “intersect”\u00a0at the top of the page.\u00a0 There are two\u00a0letter Es in it.\u00a0 I deliberately made them look very different.\u00a0 Same thing with the “ts”.\u00a0 Look a the exclamation mark after the word “happens”, just below.\u00a0 I used a heart at the bottom rather than a period.\u00a0 At various times I used a heart, an open circle, and a closed circle to dot the letter i.\u00a0 Variety is the spice of lettering!<\/p>\n Borders can intersect words.\u00a0 Rules?\u00a0 There are no stinkin’ rules except what you decide to do on a given day.\u00a0 If you want words to intersect the borders, then do it.\u00a0 Not that you need it, but you have my permission to do anything you want.\u00a0 Really.\u00a0 Go for it.<\/p>\n I think the best advice I can offer is to vary your own handwriting rather than trying to invent a new style.\u00a0 Vary upper and lower case letters.\u00a0 Make some letters larger than the rest in word.\u00a0 Make an entire word noticeably larger than others.<\/p>\n If you look at the sentence that includes the word “automatically”, you’ll see that\u00a0it’s all uppercase letters that have squared off tops and bottoms, while the others are a merry mix.\u00a0 By making that one word so obviously different, it places emphasis on it and causes it to stand out.\u00a0 The other sentence where you see the fragments that reads “…TOO. EVERY LITTLE BI…” is comprised of words made of all uppercase letters.\u00a0 That causes the words to all have equal weight and emphasis.\u00a0\u00a0 Color is another way to cause a word to have emphasis, but for today I stuck with black ink, which meant I had to find other ways to\u00a0move the viewer’s eye to a place.<\/p>\n Once the lettering was finished, I took a step back and looked over the spread with a critical eye to see what might be missing.\u00a0 The whole thing seemed a little bare and forlorn, so I cut out some images from our Mod Elements <\/a>collage sheet and glued them to the spread.\u00a0 I also punched some glitter circles.\u00a0 Because I like glitter.\u00a0 I’m just sayin’.<\/p>\n![\"2016-aja-week8-1\"](\"https:\/\/www.joggles.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/2016-aja-week8-1.jpg\")
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